RONDO North America, founded in 1964, is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Swiss-based RONDO Group, developers and manufacturers of high-quality machines and systems for the production of pastry, bread and all types of baked goods.
Thousands of customers – from small artisanal bakeries right through to large-scale industrial applications, rely on RONDO “dough-how”, the company’s unique combination of expert knowledge and experience in dough and technology. RONDO North America is responsible for sales and after sales support across the US and Canada. As RONDO North America grew, it became clear that its 18-year-old, UNIX-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) system was struggling to cope with business demands.
Jerry Murphy, President of RONDO North America explains: “We had significant problems reconciling sales, managing inventory and creating accurate reports. The user experience was also very poor and employees were frustrated by the limitations of the systems. In many instances hours of additional work had to be done to get the information we needed – so it began impacting our productivity.”
After a competitive bid process, the organisation chose Pronto Xi.
“One of the key features of Pronto Xi for us, was the ability to organise and track every sale and each transaction using Pronto’s Project module. This enables optimal business planning,” says Murphy.
RONDO North America uses the Sales Order functionality to order and track parts. Some sales however, are more complex. They may have progress payments or, span a period of several months– from the initial order, to the machinery being built and then installed.
“We typically have more than 100 different types of projects – or sales processes – on the go in any month,” adds Murphy. “Pronto Xi’s Project module enables us to track each individual project, right from if we’ve ordered the equipment to receipt of payment and when we expect the shipments to arrive. This real-time information that Pronto Xi provides about the status of each individual sale or project enables us to confidently make better business decisions.
“It ensures RONDO North America maintains the outstanding service standards we are recognised for in this industry. The previous aging ERP system we had just did not offer any of this functionality. Pronto Xi is clearly a significant contributor to our business success.”
Layering reporting with powerful analytics
RONDO also makes use of CRM functionality to track customer interactions across their whole life cycle, from prospect to customer or accounts receivable stage.
“We conduct business for North America as a whole,” says Murphy. “Our administrator, who is located in Canada, must also be able to process an order for any customer and everything needs to be captured in the one system so that anyone in any office can complete the next steps. Pronto Xi allows us to do this seamlessly.”
Zeffriena Milton, Financial Controller at RONDO North America, adds: “We also use the service module to manage our preventive maintenance contracts, capturing the time spent at a location by our service agents and which parts were purchased through the Pronto Xi inventory module. This ensures we have complete records and bill accurately. We gained a time savings of up to 50% in inventory management through correct inventory reconciliation and in the year-end stocktaking processes with Pronto Xi.”
The greatest transformation for RONDO North America since moving to Pronto Xi has been the efficiencies introduced in business reporting and financial analysis.
“We need to provide specific reports to our Swiss head office and these reports are now easily created with Pronto’s reporting and business intelligence module,” explains Milton. “One of the key reports created is a trial balance, which then provides us with a balance sheet, profit and loss statement. Pronto has enabled an estimated 26% reduction in the time we spent reconciling end of financial quarter and end of year reporting.
“We’ve completely eliminated a lot of time-consuming manual tasks, such as foreign exchange revaluation which was especially tedious. This has enabled a 10% increase in the time I can invest in business analysis that provides incredibly valuable insight about how we can improve the profitability of our business.”
Blending in cloud perfection
Like many other sales and support teams, the business experiences staff turnover and Pronto’s intuitive design is a big advantage – making it possible to train new staff quickly.
“With our old system we did not have discipline,” says Murphy. “Staff could do things their own way, and so there was significant variety in the way transactions were processed. Pronto has enabled us to enforce a standardised approach which delivers substantial efficiency improvements. This discipline also ensures reporting accuracy which is really vital.”
To satisfy its uptime and service requirements, RONDO chose to move to Pronto Cloud Managed Services. Murphy said that the motivation for going to cloud hosting was the need for comprehensive disaster recovery, as well as unparalleled uptime.
“Given our geographic dispersed operations, having ‘anywhere-anytime’ access was critical. Now with Pronto Cloud even if we have a power outage onsite, our other office still has access,” he explains.
Milton adds: “Further, when we factored in the cost of hardware, and the cost of maintaining Pronto ourselves, it was apparent that cloud was the only way for us to go. For all the right reasons, the time was right for us to migrate to the cloud.”
In 2014, RONDO updated to a later version of Pronto Xi and the process was seamless.
“We were pleased to see that some of the customisations we had are now available ‘out-of-the box’, as additional functionality,” says Murphy. “This is great because it makes supporting us easier. Our relationship with Pronto is best described as collaborative. The team is knowledgeable and in the rare instances when we have encountered a persistent problem they have worked with us to resolve it – despite us being half a world away. I would suggest Pronto to any organisation looking to manage a growing business built on accurate reporting and insight.”